Over the last two weeks, I attended two family weddings, both as a guest.
At the first wedding, I brought my camera because the wedding was on a side of the family that I’m close to so I wanted to be able to take some shots that were meaningful to me. In addition, I’d promised one of the bridesmaids (who had recently bought a DSLR) that I’d show her how it worked.
Lacking those at the second wedding, the only camera I brought was my smartphone.
I have to admit, I often feel kinda awkward taking pictures at a wedding as a guest because…well, the bride and groom usually spend somewhere in the low four figures to hire someone to come out specifically to document the whole event. I’ve seen several posts recently (some from wedding photographers, others from brides-to-be) encouraging wedding guests to leave their cameras at home and I can see the wisdom in that. Leaving aside the whole issue of the point and shoot guests getting in the hired photographer’s way, as a guest you’ve been invited to witness two people start a new life together and experiencing the event through a viewfinder or LCD screen really takes you out of the moment. Thinking about composition while the couple is exchanging rings or saying vows is probably not the best use of your time. Not to mention a lot of weddings take place in churches which, honestly, aren’t always the most well-lit places to photograph in anyway.
At the wedding that I brought my camera to, most of my shots were taken after the ceremony while I was at the reception. Many of them were candids of my extended family, which is something that the hired shooter wasn’t all that interested in but the bride (a/k/a my cousin) had asked me to document while the wedding party was off getting the formals done.At both weddings, though, between the ceremony and the formal shots, I struck up a conversation with the photographers.
And in both cases, the photographers had only brought prime lenses to shoot with.
The Convenience of Zooms is their Undoing
The lens that’s attached to my camera about 90% of the time is my Canon 24-105 L-series lens. I love that lens. The autofocus is fast and snappy, the build is great, and the images generally turn out well. That lens, with it’s red ring on the barrel, also makes it look like I know what I’m doing–even when I don’t. Before I got that lens, I was shooting with a Tamron 18- 270mm superzoom which is a popular choice among the amateur crowd, but after I moved to the Canon lens, I really started to notice how much sharper my images are with the smaller focal range of the Canon lens.
See, the problem with photography is that there’s always a tradeoff. For example, if you increase your camera’s ISO, your shutter speed increases so you can reduce blur and shake. But on the flipside, you also introduce more noise into your image. Ditto with aperture–the wider the aperture, the faster the shutter, but the less of the image is in focus.
This same thing happens with zoom lenses. With a wider focal range you end up with more optical defects like pincushion and barrel distortion as well as chromatic aberration (a/k/a color fringing). Sharpness also suffers. Furthermore, except for the pricier zooms, most have variable apertures, so that f/2.8 at the wide angle end of the zoom ring turns into an f/4 or f/5.6 at the telephoto end. I learned what that can do to your images the hard way. When I went to Yellowstone a few years ago, I used it as an opportunity to learn how to shoot in manual mode using spot metering. One of the first tricks I learned, after ending up with a good number of unintentionally underexposed shots, was to keep my f/stop at or higher than the minimum aperture at the telephoto end of my zoom so I could change my focal length without worrying about having to re-meter a shot.
In terms of dollars and cents, there’s also a big tradeoff with zooms. The zooms with a continuous f/2.8 or f/4 apertures often run into the thousands of dollars. In contrast, prime lenses with wide open apertures can be had for much less. Heck, both Canon and Nikon produce a 50mm f/1.8 lens that only costs about a hundred bucks, and the optical clarity of those plastic lenses rival that of zooms which cost many multiples of that. A better f/1.4 version (which is one of the lenses one of the wedding photographers was using) with a better focus motor and better optics can be had for a few hundred bucks more. My 100mm macro lens, which is capable of 1:1 magnification and a wide open aperture of f/2.8, costs about half of what my red ringed zoom does but it blows that L-series lens’s sharpness away.
You see, you get a lot of freedom from a zoom lens in terms of not having to move around to re-compose a shot, but many people (including most of the amateur crowd) don’t think about the tradeoffs that come with that.
The wedding photographers that I talked to thought about those tradeoff, and for them, the tradeoffs weren’t worth it. So they shot with primes. And for those of us that don’t shoot professionally, but sometimes ogle those nice pieces of zoom glass with the price tags that comfortably exceed a mortgage payment, it’s also something worth thinking about.
